Jennifer Millar keeps trash bags and hand sanitizer near her tent, and she regularly pours water mixed with hydrogen peroxide on the sidewalk nearby. Keeping herself and the patch of concrete she calls home clean is a top priority.

But this homeless encampment off a Hollywood freeway ramp is often littered with needles and trash, and soaked in urine. Rats occasionally scamper through, and Millar fears the consequences.

"I worry about all those diseases," said Millar, 43, who said she has been homeless most of her life.

Infectious diseases — some that ravaged populations in the Middle Ages — are resurging in California and around the country, and are hitting homeless populations especially hard.

For some Californians, the state’s punishing housing costs, high taxes, and constant threat of natural disaster have all become too much. They’re making their escape to areas such as Boise, Phoenix, and Reno, Nev., fueling some of the biggest home-price gains in the country. While the moves are motivated mainly by economics, they’re also highlighting political divides as conservatives from the blue state seek friendlier areas and liberal transplants find themselves in sometimes hostile territory.

A new technology in which insects are used to genetically modify crops could be converted into a dangerous, and possibly illegal, bioweapon, alleges a Science Policy Forum report released today. Naturally, the organization leading the research says it’s doing nothing of the sort.

The report is a response to a ongoing research program funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Dubbed “Insect Allies,” the idea is to create more resilient crops to help farmers deal with climate change, drought, frost, floods, salinity, and disease. But instead of modifying seeds in a lab, farmers would send fleets of insects into their crops, where the genetically modified bugs would do their work, “infecting” the plants with a special virus that passes along the new resilience genes.

Years of doomsday talk at Silicon Valley dinner parties has turned to action.

In recent months, two 150-ton survival bunkers journeyed by land and sea from a Texas warehouse to the shores of New Zealand, where they’re buried 11 feet underground.

Seven Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have purchased bunkers from Rising S Co. and planted them in New Zealand in the past two years, said Gary Lynch, the manufacturer’s general manager. At the first sign of an apocalypse — nuclear war, a killer germ, a French Revolution-style uprising targeting the 1 percent — the Californians plan to hop on a private jet and hunker down, he said.

Failing to provide health care to 29.3 million people is “unethical” and “politically wrong, morally wrong,” said former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in an interview with the Guardian.

The U.S. is the only wealthy country without universal coverage — and Ban faults “powerful” interest groups within the pharmaceutical, hospitals, and doctors sector.

“Here, the political interest groups are so, so powerful,” Ban said. “Even president, Congress, senators and representatives of the House, they cannot do much so they are easily influenced by these special interest groups.”

In June, M., a 28-year-old woman jumped from the second floor of her home in Madurai, India — 20 feet above a rocky, tar road — after a bitter argument with her husband. He had accused her of having an affair.

This was M.'s second attempt to kill herself. She survived the fall. M. had been prescribed antidepressants after her first suicide attempt seven years before but had stopped taking them. She was admitted to Madurai's Government Rajaji hospital shortly after her second suicide attempt. Three weeks later, doctors recommended that she have surgery using metallic plates to fuse her shattered spine, but her mother, uncertain and fearful about the outcome, refused to let M. go under the knife.

She was discharged a month after her ordeal and remains bedridden in her mother's home, unable to walk. Her two children, an 8-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy, who last visited her a week ago, still live with their father. Her mother gave us the details of her story and asked that only her daughter's initial be used to protect her privacy.

Thousands of years ago, ancient farmers grew oats, corn and wheat, just as they do today. They also cultivated rice and raised livestock. But a millennia ago, they cleared much more land than modern day farmers do, despite having fewer people to feed. That’s because farming was far less efficient. Mechanized harvesters didn’t exist, and growers had yet to develop crops that could be planted in tightly packed rows, yielding more food from less space.

The scientists used a computerized climate model to simulate the climate nearly 777,000 years ago. The climate back then looked more or less what the climate today would look like if not for the warming caused by carbon pollution from ancient farming and modern industrialization, he said. This climate model offered higher resolution than previous models used by the team.

Multiple passengers fell ill on separate international flights coming into Philadelphia International Airport on Thursday, CBS Philly reports. Officials said 12 passengers arriving at the airport on American Airlines flights from Paris and Munich experienced flu-like symptoms.

Multiple ambulances were dispatched to the airport.

All 250 passengers and crew on the flights were held for a medical review and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was notified to investigate. The CDC, Philadelphia Health Department and the Philadelphia Fire Department personnel performed medical evaluations on the passengers.

More companies are taking steps to reduce their impact on the environment. Earlier this year, Ceres released an excellent comprehensive view of which companies are taking what actions (and what more needs to be done). The upside is that 64 percent of the 600 largest U.S. companies have commitments in place to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

As I’ve noted here before, many companies actually have concrete, science-based targets for reductions in waste and energy and water use — so much so that companies all sound the same when they talk about their goals. I’ve urged corporations to set the appropriate targets but to hone in on one environmental or social issue they can own — that they can be known for and solve. It’s what consumers want companies to do, and being known for leading on an issue is fully leverage-able from a brand-building standpoint.

When bees aren't interrupting baseball games in Arizona, they are apparently taking in the sights at Times Square in New York.

A section of Times Square was blocked off on Tuesday after a massive bee swarm invaded a hot dog stand. The collection of bees immediately became the biggest attraction at the New York tourist destination with hundreds of people lining up to snap a photo.

If the threat of bed bugs weren't enough to make you want to sleep in a full bodysuit complete with a hoodie and face mask, Chagas disease, which is spread by the "kissing bug," has been found in 28 states in the United States, a new report from the American Heart Association says, with a potential 300,000 Americans infected. And, similar to bed bugs, triatomine bugs bite at night. Unlike bed bugs, which are more of a physical nuisance and mental nightmare, kissing bugs do transmit disease. According to a research team based at Texas A&M University, 50 percent of triatomine bugs are infected with Chagas disease, a potentially life-threatening illness that's easily spread to humans.

These insects, which can grow to the size of a penny, are referred to as kissing bugs because they tend to bite unsuspecting sleepers on the face, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted on its website. "After they bite and ingest blood, they defecate on the person. The person can become infected if T. cruzi parasites in the bug feces enter the body through mucous membranes or breaks in the skin," the CDC explained.

For the first time in recent decades, life expectancy across high-income countries is declining and this pattern is even more dramatic in the United States, according to a study published in The British Medical Journal Wednesday.

“It’s really striking that we saw so many high-income countries simultaneously experience life expectancy declines in one year,” Jessica Y. Ho, lead author and assistant professor of Gerontology and Sociology at the University of Southern California, said in an interview with ABC News.

Researchers from the University of Southern California examined trends in life expectancy across 18 high-income countries from 2014-2016. Information from the majority of these countries from 2014-2015 showed that people, on average, didn’t live as long. The average decline in longevity was 0.21 years for women and 0.18 years for men. Increasing deaths related to a severe season of influenza was thought to be a contributing cause for this decline, especially in those 65 and older.

Global coffee monolith Starbucks announced Monday that by 2020, it will no longer offer plastic straws at any of its stores.

By redesigning cups and lids for cold drinks, the company will eliminate more than 1 billion plastic straws each year, it said. Starbucks will invest instead in biodegradable "alternative-material straw options."